A complete new area of opportunity is evolving around internet business but does it offer additional jobs or replace others in a more traditional setting? Reports continue to appear about the growth in the Online Jobs market and how it will have a positive impact on the number of unemployed in the UK over the next couple of years. On the surface of it this would seem to be true.

Businesses are popping up at a great rate taking advantage of the huge demand in online shopping from individual objects for personal use such as presents, household products, fashion and books to the business to business type trade where larger scale trading takes place. We can also see the expansion of existing organizations who have realised the online opportunities and have enlarged their offering, moving into online sales and therefore widening their audience hugely. Both of these circumstances will mean an increase in employee numbers whether they Work From Home or in the office or factory.

Certainly in the short term this will reduce the jobless figures as existing roles carry on and people are recruited into the new situations created and developed by the company from this exciting new source. On top of the sales processing or customer service positions there will also be increases in back room roles such as HR, finance departments and of course in manufacturing areas. As demand on each particular business increases due to their successful internet marketing virtually all areas of the firm will need to grow. The company will also need to handle larger distribution, banking and accountancy requirements meaning that there will be increased demand on peripheral organizations servicing the growing business.

However at some point, maybe after the excitement brought on by the remarkable increase in sales has faded, the business will need to reevaluate all of it’s sections. It may be that this takes a while to come about, however in the most astute companies they may already be expecting downturns in other sales areas. The company may at that point see that areas such as high street sales have been negatively affected by the move towards internet sales and it may be decided that it is no longer worth being active in those areas.

So ultimately we could see simply a shift in the sales arena, from the more conservative types such as high street shops and catalogue chains to the newer and more successful Internet Business. Jobs will be lost in the old sectors as high street shop profits plumet and organizations see a much better return on investment from their e-commerce activities. The workforce in these reducing markets will reduce and we could end up with a jobless figure that is larger than the existing one.

Of course, it’s not at all certain that there will be an increase in joblessness as a result of these trends. History from the dawn of the industrial revolution teaches us that these sorts of efficiencies make society as a whole richer over time. A proportion of the employees losing their jobs will start up new micro businesses, and taking advantage of the trends which caused their owners to lose their jobs in the first place, enough of these businesses will expand into important employers in their own right. Thereby employing those whose jobs were lost at the start of the trend.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 4:34 am and is filed under Online Business, Promotion and Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.